The most famous Indian response to the behavior of
white Americans in the West was, and probably still is, the
Nez Percé Chief Joseph's "Indian's Views of Indian
Affairs," originally published in the North American
Review 128 (April 1879). The Indian from Montana's
Flathead tribe speaking below may have been Charlot. The
immediate actions he is protesting were the attempts to tax
the tribe and at the same time remove them from their
ancestral land in the Bitter Root Valley.

Yes, my people, the white man wants us to pay him. He
comes in his intent, and says we must pay him--pay him for
our own--for the things we have from our God and our
forefathers; for the things he never owned and never gave
us. What law or right is that? What shame or what charity?
The Indian says that a woman is more shameless than a man:
but the white man has less shame than our women. Since our
forefathers first beheld him more than seven times ten
winters have snowed and melted. Most of them, like those
snows, have dissolved away. Their spirits went whither they
came; his, they say, go there too. Do they meet and see us
here? Can he blush before his Maker, or is he forever dead.
Is his prayer like his promise--a trust of the wind? Is it
a sound without sense? Is it a thing whose life is a foul
thing? And is he not foul? He has filled graves with our
bones. His horses, his cattle, his sheep, his men, his
women have a rot. Does not his breath, his gums stink? His
jaws lose their teeth and he stamps them with false ones;
yet he is not ashamed. No, no; his course is destruction;
he spoils what the spirit who gave us this country made
beautiful and clean. But that is not enough; he wants us to
pay him besides his enslaving our country. Yes, and our
people, besides, that degradation of a tribe who never were
his enemies. What is he? Who sent him here? We were happy
when he first came. We first thought he came from the
light: but he comes like the dusk of the evening now; not
like the dawn of the morning. He comes like a day that has
passed, and night enters our future with him.

To take and to lie should be burned on his forehead, as
he burns the sides of my stolen horses with his own name.
Had Heaven's Chief burnt him with some mark to refuse him,
we might have refused him. No; we did not refuse him in his
weakness. In his poverty we fed, we cherished him--yes,
befriended him, and showed him the fords and defiles of our
lands. Yet we did not think his face was concealed with
hair, and that he often smiled like a rabbit in his own
beard. A long-tailed, skulking thing, fond of flat lands,
and soft grass and woods.

Did he not feast us with our own cattle, on our own
land, yes, on our own plain by the cold spring; did he not
invite our hands to his papers; did he not promise before
the sun and before the eye that put fire in it, and in the
name of both, and in the name of his own Chief, promise us
what he promised--to give us what he has not given; to do
what he knew he would never do? Now, because he lied, and
because he yet lies, without friendship, manhood, justice,
or charity, he wants us to give him money--pay him more.
When shall he be satisfied? A roving skulk, first; a
natural liar, next; and withal a murderer, a tyrant.

To confirm his purpose; to make the trees and stones and
his own people hear him, he whispers soldiers, lockhouses
and iron chains. My people, we are poor; we are fatherless.
The white man fathers this doom--yes, this curse on us and
on the few that may see a few days more. He, the cause of
our ruin, is his own snake which he says stole on his
mother in her own country to lie to her. He says his story
is that man was rejected and cast off. Why did we not
reject him forever? He says one of his virgins had a son
nailed to death on two cross sticks to save him. Were all
of them dead when that young man died, we would all be safe
now, and our country our own.

But he lives to persist; yes, the rascal is also an
unsatisfied beggar, and his hangman and swine follow his
walk. Pay him money? Did he inquire, how? No, no, his
meanness ropes his charity, his avarice wives his envy, his
race breeds to extort. Did he speak at all like a friend?
He saw a few horses and some cows, and so many tens of
rails with the few of us that own them. His envy thereon
baited to the quick. Why thus; because he himself says he
is in a big debt, and wants us to help pay it. His avarice
put him in debt, and he wants us to pay him for it and be
his fools. Did he ask how many a helpless widow, how many a
fatherless child, how many a blind and naked thing fare a
little of that little we have? Did he--in a destroying
night when the mountains and the firmaments put their faces
together to freeze us--did he inquire if we had a spare rag
of a blanket to save his lost and perishing steps to our
fires? No, no; cold he is, and merciless. Four times in one
shivering night I last winter knew the old one-eyed Indian,
Kenneth, the gray man of full seven tens of winters, was
refused shelter in four of the white man's houses on his
way that bad night; yet the aged, blinded man was turned
out to his fate. No, no; he is cold and merciless, haughty
and overbearing. Look at him, and he looks at you--how? His
fishy eyes scan you as the why-oops do the shelled blue
cock. He is cold, and stealth and envy are with him, and
fit him as do his hands and feet. We owe him nothing. He
owes us more than he will pay us, and yet he says there is
a God.

I know another aged Indian, with his only daughter and
wife alone in their lodge. He had a few beaver skins and
four or five poor horses--all he had. The night was bad and
held every stream in thick ice; the earth was white; the
stars burned nearer us as if to pity us, but the more they
burned the more stood the hair of the deer on end with
cold, nor heeded they the frost bursting bark of the
willows. Two of the white man's people came to the lodge,
lost and freezing pitifully. They fared well inside that
lodge. The old wife and only daughter unbound and cut off
their frozen shoes; gave them new ones and crushed
sage-bark rind to keep their feet warm and smooth. She gave
them warm soup; boiled deer meat and boiled beaver. They
were saved; their safety returned to make them live. After
awhile they would not stop; they would go. They went away.
Mind you; remember well; at midnight they returned,
murdered the old father and his daughter and her mother
asleep, took the beaver skins and horses and left. Next
day, the first and only Indian they met, a fine young man,
they killed, put his body under the ice and rode away on
his horse.

Yet they say we are not good. Will he tell his own
crimes? No, no; his crimes to us are left untold. But the
Desolater bawls and cries the clangers of the country from
us, the few left of us. Other tribes kill and ravish his
women and stake his children, and eat his steers, and he
gives them blankets and sugar for it. We the poor Flatheads
who never troubled him, he wants now to distress and make
poorer.

I have no more to say, my people; but this much I have
said and close to hear your minds about this payment. We
never begot laws or rights to ask it. His laws never gave
us a blade, nor a tree, nor a duck, nor a grouse, nor a
trout. No; like the wolverine that steals your cache, how
often does he come? You know he comes as long as he lives,
and takes more and more, and dirties what he leaves.